Open Source

Let’s bring some change to the Community Council. A few of those running for Community Council have been on the council for years and not given up their seat to allow new ideas and fresh leadership to come to the council.
I think this is bad not only in governance of open source projects, but in leadership of any body whether it be a nonprofit board, a city council, a parliament, or congress.

At least two of the most senior people, in terms of how long they have been on community council, are in my opinion also the most disconnected and least communicative with the community, with one of them not having contributed to Ubuntu outside of their council role in years.

I think it is time to shake things up and that is why I am prioritizing my vote for the following four people as top picks and I’d encourage you to use your vote however you want but please consider shaking it up and bringing in some new faces.

TL;DR We know entrenchment in community leadership, nonprofit boards and politics is generally bad so lets shake it up!

Maybe you have not heard, but the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a proposal which would allow the agency to regulate device manufacturers and make them lock down certain wireless devices such as routers.

This is not good news because if passed, this means OEM’s could prevent users from flashing free and open source firmwares like OpenWRT or other custom firmwares on to hardware they purchase. This is not very consumer friendly and not to mention router OEM’s like Cisco, Linksys, Belkin, Asus, Buffalo, and others are not that great about updating the internals of their firmware and sometimes leave users with firmware that exposes them to security vulnerabilities.

I wanted to write something short and encourage folks to please go and comment here. If this proposal passes, it could have an international impact unless OEM’s decided to ship a U.S. version and International version of their routers which is very unlikely.

Glucosio is an open source project I founded recently. I blogged about the kick off here. I wanted to give an update as the project is moving forward better than I had imagined.

Development

We are currently aiming for our Glucosio for Android Alpha release this month with a tentative release date on September 20th, 2015. This being our Alpha and our first public release will be the base of the app. It will have basic functions but the more advance features on our roadmap will be distributed across subsequent releases and I’m sure we will keep coming up with innovative ideas as we research the needs of people with diabetes. Hat tip to Paolo, Ahmar, Satyajit and Elio who have been working tirelessly on this release.

Translations

I’m happy to report that Glucosio is already translated into 13 languages. More specifically: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bengali (India), Breton, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, German, Italian, Spanish, Spanish (Venezuela), and Spanish (Mexico). We plan to have Greek, Japanese, Vietnamese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi before launch. (Want to translate these for us? Check here.) Translations are really important to this project because every language we can offer is a population of people we can reach with our app seeing as diabetes is a global problem. The more people we reach worldwide, the more we can offer great tools to and the more opt-ins to share anonymous trends and demographic data with diabetes researchers we can get. Hat tip to Arturo who is leading our l10n efforts!

iOS

We are still actively looking for a lead iOS Developer or even two people contributing part-time on our Glucosio for iOS product. If you know someone, tell them to ping me!

HTML5 App (Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen)

This is sitting in our backburner but it is definitely within the scope of our vision and will help us reach platforms like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen. We initially looked at doing cross-platform development but realized we could give a better experience if we built individual apps for Android and iOS.

Funding

Currently, this project has been very low cost thanks to some great supporters. Other than that, I have bootstrapped any costs, which again have been very small. We have decided from the start of this project that we do not want to monetize our apps because we feel it will dilute our vision and goals for the project. That being said, maybe the team will look into donations, crowdfunding or other options in the future if it becomes necessary. We are also looking into becoming a SPI (Software in the Public Interest) associated project so we will have a financial home and some resources available to us.

What’s next?

We are just going to be focusing for the next few weeks on getting this Alpha out the door. That includes wrapping up translations, doing some internal testing, and making sure we get out a crisp Alpha (that happens right?). Then we will sit down and discuss next things we want to prioritize and have a release post-mortem to improve our next cycle.

How you can help?

We have a really great team of people and would love to have more help. It has so far helped for us to have lots of hands in the pot and allowed us to scale as a project and get a lot of work done in a very short amount of time. If you are interested in contributing, hit us up at hello [AT] glucosio.org or ping us on Twitter at @GlucosioApp. We have contribution areas to include Development (iOS/Android/HTML5), l10n, Marketing, QA, and more. Hopefully by our Beta release, we will have some crisp documentation on our wiki on how to get started on all of these pathways!

In case you, as a Mozillian, have missed Christie Koehler’s tweets of the last 24 hours, I implore you to have a look but also at the responses from Mozillians and employees current and former who agree that the issues she is pointing out are real and you can read about them here.

These issues are making Mozilla bleed and some are caused or allowed to exist because our leadership, our very governance allows them. We need to have a conversation about these problems and cannot just let Christie’s departure be in vain and roll along with the status quo.

We need to fix the culture at Mozilla and we need to invest in community and diversity and we CANNOT let the status quo continue if we expect to be able to be competitive, innovative and push the mission forward.

Can we have a town hall to discuss some of these issues? Can we get a response from Mitchell, Chris or Mark on these issues?

Discussion on this post is closed but feel free to engage on the Twitterverse. (Be polite)

“I am writing to you about a very disturbing aspect of Windows 10. Specifically, that the update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.”

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to Yahoo and making that the default upon upgrade and not respecting their previous settings ?What about baking Pocket and Tiles into the experience? Did users want these features? All I have seen is opposition to them.

“When we first saw the Windows 10 upgrade experience that strips users of their choice by effectively overriding existing user preferences for the Web browser and other apps, we reached out to your team to discuss this issue. Unfortunately, it didn’t result in any meaningful progress, hence this letter.”

Again see above and think about the past year or two where Mozilla has overridden existing user preferences in Firefox. The big difference here is Mozilla calls it acting on behalf of the user as its agent, but when Microsoft does the same it is taking away choice?

Today I learned of some of the worst kind of news, my friend and a valuable contributor to the great open source community Nóirín Plunkett passed away. They (this is their preferred pronoun per their twitter profile) was well regarded in the open source community for contributions.

I had known them for about four years now, having met them at OSCON and seen them regularly at other events. They were always great to have a discussion with and learn from and they always had a smile on their face.

It is very sad to lose them as they demonstrated an unmatchable passion and dedication to open source and community and surely many of us will spend many days, weeks and months reflecting on the sadness of this loss.